


La douleur savoureuse

by ba_lailah



Category: The Old Guard (Movie 2020)
Genre: Angst, Dreams and Nightmares, Gen, Ghosts, Grief/Mourning, Hurt/Comfort, Medication, Pre-Canon, Pre-Movie: The Old Guard (2020), Sharing a Bed
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-08-07
Updated: 2020-08-07
Packaged: 2021-03-06 02:00:46
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,117
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/25645462
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/ba_lailah/pseuds/ba_lailah
Summary: Booker takes a sleeping pill, hoping it will stop his dreams of Quynh. It does, but not without a cost.
Relationships: Andy | Andromache of Scythia & Booker | Sebastien le Livre
Comments: 12
Kudos: 63
Collections: Battleship 2020, Battleship 2020 - Yellow Team





	La douleur savoureuse

**Author's Note:**

  * For [labocat](https://archiveofourown.org/users/labocat/gifts).



Booker hands Andy his flask. "So I won't forget," he says. "The doctor said it would be a bad mix. Might even kill me." One corner of his mouth turns up.

She takes it, watching him. "You sure about this?"

"Yeah." He taps the little tablet out into his palm, weighs it. "Deep sleep, the doctor said. Dreamless sleep."

"Book..." Andy takes a swig from the flask, wipes her mouth on the back of her hand, tucks it away. "The dreams you have aren't ordinary dreams. I don't know that some ordinary medicine can stop them."

"So what should I do? Pray?" Booker scoffs. "I tried that, for about a hundred years."

"I don't know," Andy says softly. "Maybe we should look for her again—"

"No, stop, we're not talking about this again." Booker gets up, pacing around the two-room shoebox apartment that's been their Chicago safehouse since 1968. "An entire fucking airplane went down in the ocean and the best search teams in the world couldn't find it. An airplane! How are you and I gonna find one little box? No." He rubs his hand across his mouth, realizing as he does it that he's mimicking Andy's earlier movement. Even without a drink to hand, he's still a drunk. "No. I'll take this, and I won't dream. And then maybe I can stop pickling myself, and you can stop looking so worried."

"I look worried because you worry me," Andy says. "So you're going to have to stop first."

"I'm trying to take care of myself," Booker says. He sits down wearily on the pancake-flat futon sofa next to Andy, remembering what a modern marvel it was when they got it sometime in the early 1980s. Now it's old and worn out, like him. "That's what this is, Andy, is me trying to take care of myself. I'm trying, I swear."

"Hey." Andy wraps an arm around him. "I know."

He reaches for the flask, remembers, and gets a glass of water from the kitchen instead. The pill goes down easily, like it's nothing.

An hour later, he finds himself dozing off. He carefully marks his place and closes his book, and settles back in bed. But he doesn't fall asleep. Instead, something makes him sit up again. A sound, a scent—

And his oldest son is sitting on the foot of the bed, as clear as day.

Booker lunges to embrace him, but the specter is insubstantial, and Booker nearly falls to the floor. "Alain," he whispers, trying to right himself. "Please, are you real?"

Alain's lips shape the word _Papa_ but make no sound. He's much younger than he was when Booker last saw him—a boy, really, perhaps the age he was when Booker first died—and he smiles with a boy's pure love and joy. His skeleton suit is wholly incongruous against the fuschia bedspread. His dangling feet are bare, making Booker think of the days they spent splashing in the sea before the war destroyed everything. His small ghostly hand traces down Booker's face. _Papa,_ he says again, and something else—Booker's no lip-reader, even in French, but maybe _I've found you_?

"My son," he chokes out, "my son, I'm here, you found me, I'm here. I never left! You're the one who left!" He begins to weep, his hands clutching the sheet so tightly that the thin cotton begins to tear. "You left me, all of you, you left me."

"Book?" Andy calls out from the other room.

"Andy, my son, it's my son," Booker cries. "He came, he found me. Alain, take me back with you!"

Andy comes in, fast, with a knife in her hand. She looks carefully around the room and then sheathes it. "There's no one here, Book. Just you and me."

"I saw him." Booker looks desperately around the room, but Alain has vanished. "I saw him, Alain, my son, my little boy. He was here. I thought..." He's crying so hard he can barely breathe. "I thought Death sent him to fetch me."

"I think that pill sent you on a bad trip," Andy says, sitting on the bed near him but not too near. 

Booker barely hears her. All he can do is plead for Alain to take him, over and over. He crumples onto the bed, beating his fists into the pillows, and sobs until exhaustion overtakes him.

When he wakes up, his mouth is bone-dry and his head is full of cotton. Andy is asleep next to him, a surprise—she's the lightest sleeper of them all, and if she has the choice to sleep alone, she takes it. He thought she'd be out on the futon. He tries to ease out of bed without waking her, but it's impossible. She opens her eyes and sits up all at once, as though she was never asleep at all. Maybe after thousands of years her body has found ways to heal itself even from tiredness.

"Are you okay?" she asks.

"Yeah, why?" He scrubs his palms across his eyes. "Thirsty. Groggy. But I think the pill worked. I don't remember dreaming."

She frowns at him. "Do you remember seeing a ghost?"

"A what?"

She explains while he sits there, appalled—that it happened, that what she's describing sounds exactly like how he would react if he saw Alain's ghost, that he doesn't remember any part of it. Tears well up in his eyes. What's worse, to have felt such hope and such grief, or to have forgotten even that brief sweet moment—some part of it must have been sweet—of seeing his son's face again?

Andy holds out her hand, palm up. Booker picks up the bottle of pills from the bedside table and gives it to her, without argument or hesitation. She disappears into the bathroom, and he hears her flush them away. She comes back and holds him for a long time while he cries.

For the rest of the day she's unusually gentle: getting him outside for a walk along the lakeside, ordering his favorite Chinese takeout for lunch, letting him pick the movie they watch while they eat. He wonders who she's been reminded of, who she's grieving. Or maybe she's thinking of the times she's had her own blackest of black depressions and he's cajoled and wrestled her out of them. Joe and Nicky have love. Andy and Booker have a mutual refusal to let the other wallow in suffering. If one of them gives up, they'll both give up, and neither of them can bear that. So they keep grimly not giving up, together.

That evening, he drinks, and that night, he dreams of Quynh.

**Author's Note:**

> The title means "delectable suffering" and is from [Le Rêve d'un Curieux / The Dream of a Curious Man by Charles Baudelaire](https://fleursdumal.org/poem/230), the most Booker poem ever:
> 
> _J'étais mort sans surprise, et la terrible aurore  
>  M'enveloppait. — Eh quoi! n'est-ce donc que cela?  
> La toile était levée et j'attendais encore._
> 
> _I had died and was not surprised; the awful dawn  
>  Enveloped me. — What! is that all there is to it?  
> The curtain had risen and I was still waiting._

**Works inspired by this one:**

  * [[podfic] La douleur savoureuse](https://archiveofourown.org/works/25700221) by [ffg_podfics (flowersforgraves)](https://archiveofourown.org/users/flowersforgraves/pseuds/ffg_podfics)




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